Individual energy markets define market specific rules for market participants in terms of the information that the market participants must regularly submit to the market to meet their market obligations. The market specific rules tend to be complex and change frequently. Industry market participants have used so-called “bespoke systems,” which are custom software systems developed according to the exact specifications provided by the market participants. Bespoke systems, however, specifically address the market-specific requirements of the individual market participant, and reflect the market-specific rules in effect at a time when the systems are developed. Any changes in the market-specific rules and/or the network configuration for which the bespoke systems were custom developed render those bespoke systems obsolete.
Commercial Off-the-Shelf (“COTS”) data management solutions are configurable by the industry market participant for the market-specific rules in effect, and established at a time when the COTS solutions are installed. Similar to bespoke systems, each change in the market-specific rules and/or network renders the COTS solutions outdated until a time-consuming custom update of the installed COTS solutions can be performed. Such custom updates are performed through manual edits of the code of the COTS solutions, thereby rendering updates labor intensive and slow to reflect changes in the market-specific rules and/or changes in the network. Accordingly, COTS solutions are prone to inaccuracies in capturing, aggregating and processing data during this period of obsolescence based on outdated market-specific rules and network configurations. Thus, such COTS solutions are not suitable for use in markets, such as energy markets, where market-specific rules change frequently.